My Space Station seems to have developed a weird problem: it's awarding *two* extra balls upon reaching the first replay score value.

Some background. This problem is brand new - it appeared immediately after I reinstalled the CPU board a few days ago, after taking it out to do some work. This naturally did a reset of the settings memory, so I had to go through the Adjustments menu and re-enter everything. It's on Free Play, with fixed replay score values of 1,900,000 and 5,000,000. Everything else seems to be working fine; I know the game well (I've owned it for over 20 years), and the only problem I've observed is the weird double extra ball. I went through all of the settings and couldn't see anything in there that would (or even could) cause this, but just in case I did a manual factory reset (Ad 70) and then went back through and entered all of my settings yet again. Same problem!

The problem only seems to affect the first replay level. Achieving the second replay score (5,000,000 in my current settings) only awards one extra ball, as you'd expect, as do the explicit extra balls and specials (e.g., SHUTTLE/STATION target completion or via the bonus X drop targets).

Note that nothing unusual happens display-wise at the time the first replay score is reached. The machine just displays the regular Extra Ball message and fires the sound/flasher effects. There's no apparent double award at this point in terms of the display effects. But when that ball drains and you start the next ball, the Shoot Again light remains lit, until you drain that first extra ball. At that point it turns off. What I infer is that the internal extra ball counter is getting incremented twice when the first replay score is reached. (As opposed to something being wrong with the Shoot Again lamp itself or with decrementing the counter when the extra ball is put into play - if either of those were the problem, the same thing should happen for other types of extra ball awards.)

Has anyone seen anything like this in Space Station or any other System 11 machines? I've gone through the Adjustments menu a dozen times, and I can't see any reason this would happen due to the settings. I also can't think of any plausible way a hardware fault would manifest this way. The only explanation I can come up with is that a gamma ray or ESD hit my ROM (I *did* have it out of the machine for a few hours) and scrambled a byte or two of program code - but even that seems hard to believe, as it seems so improbable that such damage would manifest so benignly (and so orderly-ly). Plus it seems like it would show up as a ROM checksum error in the power-on self-diagnostics.

Any ideas? I'm stumped!

Thanks for the idea - I'll give it a try just to be sure, but I think it's really unlikely that a switch glitch is the culprit. It's too consistent. It's not an intermittent problem; it's 100% repeatable. I tested a number of times with the glass off, just pushing switches to rack up points to the replay level, and it works exactly the same way every time. There's also no question about whether the software recognizes the ball launch correctly - it does, every time. There's a music change on ball launch, and it's executing that correctly on every launch. Likewise, it recognizes the ball draining consistently. If it's not a software/ROM problem, it's got to be something repeatable, not intermittent.

I tried the switch test - all of the switches look solid.

I did do a couple of manual factory resets trying to debug this, to no avail. My initial thought was that it must be an errant config setting, but I couldn't figure out which one(s), so I did a factory reset to clear out all of my changes. I did another a little later just to be sure. No luck; same problem even after the reset.

I haven't tried changing to a credit award - I'll give that a try and report back.

That's a very interesting data point! Even so, I'm almost certain it didn't do this before I did the CPU board repair - I'm almost sure it's new behavior since then. No way to verify that now, of course.

Anyone else out there with a Space Station who can add another data point one way or the other on this?

The idea of just turning off the replay awards occurred to me too, but I think I'm too attached to positive feedback. I think if it's a choice between two free balls for the first award or no award at all, I'd rather have the double award. Space Station is a tough enough game as it is. Definitely irritating, though!

Okay, gave it a try. One credit awarded. Whatever's going on only affects the "replay = ball" setting.

(One odd thing I noticed: I did a status report at the start of the game, and it showed 2 credits. After I reached the replay score, 3 credits. So it added one on the replay, but where did the first two come from? The machine is on Free Play and it was after a fresh power-up.)

Exactly the same thing I'm seeing! And it's only the *first* replay level that's affected. The second level only awards one ball as you'd expect. (Haven't tried enabling the third and fourth replay scores.)

Interesting addendum to this. I just tried out the Visual Pinball version of Space Station, and it does the same thing with the double extra ball on replay! Maybe it really is a bug in the original ROM software after all. I just can't believe I never noticed this before in all the time I've owned this machine... It makes me wonder if there's some magic combination of config settings that I stumbled upon in the past and lost when I did the hard reset.

Also, I have found an imperfect workaround. If you set MAX EXTRA BALLS to 1, that does in fact limit the first replay award to one extra ball, effectively quashing the bug. The trade-off is that the cap applies across the board, so you can't earn two different kinds of extra balls on the same ball in play. But I suppose this fits with the general cruelty level of Space Station.

All I can tell you is that I've never seen that behavior. (I've owned my Space Station for about 20 years, so I think there's a good chance I would have seen it by now if it were going to happen at all with mine.) Nothing about your settings looks questionable. I could believe that it's either a hardware or software error, but given that I've never seen it, a software bug seems less likely (in that a software bug should reproduce across all machines with the same software version, as the software should be identical, whereas a hardware problem could be specific to an individual machine). I have the L5 ROMs installed, which as far as I can tell are the last version.